The Trump Card

So, a comment on this post of mine suggested that the commenter thought that Google was holding a trump card up its sleeve. Well, after a little thinking, I think I may have puzzled out a piece of it: Google is going to make easy use of its web services on its own phone (Duh!). In fact, the idea of a web desktop may not take form on a desktop computer, but on a mobile phone. I can see six icons on my iPhone home screen that use web services and two that use phone services. Well, there may be an entire screen of web desktop items on the Google phone. Google, instead of telling us to write web apps for its phone is instead telling us to write apps that connect to the web (at 3G speeds), and get data from them. The same things apply to social networking over XMPP or a web updating feed like RSS.
As a scenario, lets say a user named Alice wants to check what her friend Bob is doing right now. She either logs on to Facebook and checks Bob's status OR she can use an XMPP application. Bob probably has his mobile phone with him; however he is probably not always on Facebook. If she sends him an XMPP message he gets a notification at the top of his phone screen and immediately knows what it is about, compared to a SMS message that reveals nothing about its content on the home screen, only that you got a message. It is this intuitiveness that would provide the Google phone with an amazing experience.
XMPP can be used for other services too. For example, if Alice wants to tell Bob where she is she can just select a location in Google maps and press send to Bob. Yet another thing you cannot do with text messages.
We know that Google is attempting to make headway into social networking with its orkut service. Desktop apps linked in to the web are superior to web apps because you can do some things like animations a lot more simply. If Google provides a simple framework for plugins to the Android social network people can easily download 5MB plugins (in about 30 seconds). People would be able to send messages to other people with the same plugin, and if this gets popular, who knows what we'll see (I think something like Remote Apple Events would be really cool).

Technorati Tags: 3G, Android Phone, Google, gPhone, Mobile Telephony, XMPP, Social Networking